Gobind Thukral

WAY back during the first Janata government in India during 1977-1980, a dilemma struck the present day leadership of the Bharatiya Janata Party; whether to retain the membership of its mentor, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh or adopt the semi secular grouping of Janata Party unreservedly. It chose to keep its link with R.S.S. This dealt a deadly blow to the government and a mid term election that followed brought back Mrs. Indira Gandhi to power. An impression gained ground that except Congress no one could provide a stable government. It was reconfirmed this election also. Bharatiya Janata Party was born shedding its old name of Jana Sangh. The leadership continued to follow the Hindutva line of the RSS and Jana Sangh more doggedly, losing itself to mere two Lok Sabha seats and then leading a coalition government at the national level from 2001 to 2004.

Ever since then it has been losing wicket after wicket. This year’s ignominious defeat has once again brought back its central contradiction.  It wants to be a modern party with a future and yet retain its mentor, RSS. As is famously said, nothing fails like failure. The present upheavals in the BJP following its worst electoral performance in two decades are direct result of its defeat in the Lok Sabha election, second time in succession. Some leaders seem convinced that the RSS has become an albatross around BJP’S neck. The RSS meanwhile has been tightening its grip on the BJP through placing its workers in key posts like Narendra Modi in Gujarat and it continues to give directions on daily basis the party leadership.

A defeat on this scale was bound to lead to some discord but the profound unrest points to an existential crisis in a party whose claimed strengths have been its discipline and its rock-solid faith in Hindutva. Today these ideals appear under serious challenge, with dissidents rising in open rebellion against the leadership and questioning the mobilisational utility of Hindutva.

Currently the party headquarters are receiving resignation letter after letter, stating clearly that Hindutva agenda can no longer be sold to Indians. Former union ministers Jaswant Singh and Yashwant Sinha who resigned from party positions represent this growing school of thought. There are two reasons for this. One, Indians want to a secular grouping committed to a stable government and socio economic development. Second, the BJP stands exposed as it did nothing during six year’s of rule to build the Ram Temple at Ayudhaya. This has lead to the impression that it pays lips sympathy to Hindutva and Ram Temple as these were mere weapons to capture power.

The BJP if it takes the clear hard positions taken by the RSS on the issue of Hindutva and the consequent directives to the leaders  is close to a vertical split.  There are in fact, no easy ways to come out of the contradictions which it has woven around itself. Party presidents, including Lal Krishan Advani have been scraping at the RSS while bowing before it. Not even Atal Bihari Vajpayee during this prime ministership dared to openly defy the RSS, but continued to follow different path though worst carnage happened during his time in Gujarat. He could conveniently wear two hats. It is difficult for the BJP’s prime minister in waiting Advani and many others. This predicament has become sharp during the time when Advani was president.

A section of BJP is constantly debating as to what exactly Hindutva is?  A benign look would make us believe it is an inclusive philosophy emphasising the centrality of Hinduism. Yet in practice, it is often a backward-looking and views modern developments through the prism of a mythological Hindu past to an absurd degree. The RSS outfits recommend Hindutva for the promotion of their plainly close-minded, communal and collectively reprehensible agenda.  This philosophy only helped to increase confusion in the manifesto of the BJP released and debated with great funfair and later the hate speech of Varun Gandhi. It symbolizes the confusion that prevails in the party.

As long as the BJP’s symbiotic relationship with the RSS lasts, the task of defining Hindutva will fall on the latter. Even those in or close to the BJP seeking to fine tune Hindutva to be able to sell it are not asking for its abolition. The original Jan Sangh has presented an alternative view of India to the narration of the party of Indian independence, the Congress. However the BJP might choose to express its legacy, it is the exponent of what it now calls Hindutva.

Every political party has its fringe elements, but only the BJP leadership has, more often than not, refused to distance itself from them, whether it relates to carrying out a shameful vendetta against a painter of the ilk of M.F. Hussein or on loonies conducting a raid on a Mangalore bar belabouring its women patrons. Why do BJP-ruled states provide fertile ground for plain acts of moral policing and revolting conduct, as at a Baroda art school?

Essentially the game is to capturer political power. Ideological confusion, dissensions and debates would always keep cropping up. If BJP today leaves its Hindutva plank or it earlier avatar Hindi, Hindu and Hindustan and adopt what once it said Gandhian socialism, which political space can occupy. Middle of the center is already with Congress? It can at best compete with that party for political power. It can not go left of the center as that would turn upside down. It came close to the left on nuclear issue, but quickly marked itself away from the Communists. And, right of the center position whatever by the advice rendered on television sets or on editorial pages of some newspaper editors offers little chance to attain power. Broadly on economic polices it s closer to the Congress and has the same neo liberal reform agenda. India shall have to travel far to have two party system, may take decades. Its size, its multicultural, multilingual nature besides regionalism would always scuttle two party systems. India  would remain in the coalition eras for long.

BACK

On a wing and a prayer

Chaitanya Kalbag

LAST week I called up a friend. She was on the train from Bangalore to Chennai. I was surprised. She is not the kind of person who travels by train. I asked her how long the train journey takes. Four and a half hours, she replied. So why are you taking a train when you are so busy and time is so important, I asked. Simple, she said. “It takes an hour and a half from my office to Bangalore airport. Then there is check-in, security checks, a delayed take-off because the plane arrived late, more time on the tarmac while waiting for clearance from Air Traffic Control, and then a 45-minute flight. I found it quicker to take a train. There is less stress, minimal turbulence, and I can read a book!”

This is really the story of India, and of countless surveys and papers in which Elephant India is compared with Tiger China. I have travelled to nearly every country in Asia and their airports always made me cringe in shame at the memory of Delhi or Mumbai. Changi, Chep Lak Kok, Incheon, Bangkok, Narita, Kansai, Beijing, Shanghai, Jakarta, Lahore – even Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City and Phnom Penh – all made me wish I could return to Delhi and not have to descend dark stairs, get into a jerky bus, and enter a terminal building with a smelly entranceway to wait for baggage that is brought in on clanking trailers and thrown roughly on a creaky old belt by tired men.

Just before the elections, as my plane circled Delhi, I was struck by how similar our politics and our state-owned airline are. "We know you have a choice of other airlines (parties) but we appreciate your custom (votes)". Ageing aircraft (infrastructure) crewed by ageing staff (politicians). Endlessly stacked-up planes waiting for permission to land ... don't they conjure up a picture of endless project delays? "Don't blame us, blame the weather/air traffic control/technical faults/late arrival of our own plane" sound so much like "Don't blame us, blame our coalition partners/the opposition/the global economy/the ISI/late arrival of the monsoon".

It costs more to fly from Delhi to Kerala than to Singapore, but that's not our fault -- look at how our nasty trade partners are trying to get us to lower our tariffs and taxes so they can fill our skies with their planes. Lost baggage (promises)? Not our fault again -- it's our alliance partners. Please continue to give us your business (votes) -- we promise things will get better once we have that extra runway (a few more parliament seats). Coming off my plane, exhausted and wrung-out, I saw signs that promised a better airport by next year. Where would we be if we had not offered to host the Commonwealth Games?

Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has referred constantly to the need for more infrastructure to lift India out of the seven to eight percent growth rut. If India does not grow at a steady double-digit rate over the next decade, the elephant will stumble, and fall to its knees. Last week President Pratibha Patil referred to infrastructure as one of the key goals of the new government: “(Attention to recession-affected sectors) must be accompanied by measures to achieve a countercyclical expansion in public investment in infrastructure sectors including public-private partnerships in these sectors. Financing the investment will be a critical constraint and my Government is determined to ensure that innovative steps are taken in this area, consistent with a medium-term strategy of prudent fiscal management.”

Back in February, India’s interim budget said 50 new infrastructure projects worth Rs 67,700 crore ($14.5 billion) had been approved, and the India Infrastructure Finance Company, which will finance 60 percent of commercial loans in critical public-private partnerships, plans to raise Rs 30,000 crore ($6.8 billion) during the current fiscal year ending March 2010.

It helps if you are a Congress government with a clutch of Nehru-Gandhi names to christen every new populist spending plan. We have the Jawaharlal Nehru National Urban Renewal Mission, which has spent over Rs 50,000 crore ($10.6 billion) over the past four years on the “urban poor”. Under the Indira Awas Yojana, the government has built more than six million homes for rural poor. And now, President Patil has announced the Rajiv Awas Yojana, which aims to build a “slum free” India for the 62 million people living in shanties in the nation’s cities.

All these schemes come at a steep price. There was a huge surge in what can only be described as election-year fiscal profligacy in 2008/9. The government’s revenue deficit shot up to 4.4 percent of GDP against an estimated 1.0 percent – a four-fold increase. The fiscal deficit has alarmingly rocketed to Rs 326,515 crore ($69.5 billion) or 6 percent of GDP from the original estimate of 2.5 percent. In ordinary language, the Indian government was printing money – literally. And Reserve Bank of India figures bear this out. In the week ended May 29, currency in circulation totalled Rs 709,364 crore ($150.9 billion), a rise of Rs 96,699 crore ($20.6 billion) over a year earlier.

But what about the poor in India, the target of all this largesse? Are the country’s 1.2 billion people truly moving towards economic equity? In its Global Economic Prospects 2009 report last December, the World Bank noted that rising food prices were hitting the poor hardest. In urban areas in South Asia, it warned, poverty levels had gone up by as much as 4.4 percentage points – the highest in the developing world.

Already, 32.3 percent of the urban population and 43.3 percent of the rural population in South Asia is poor, that is, living at or below the “poverty benchmark” of 1.25 U.S. dollars (less than 60 rupees) a day. This is only slightly better than Sub-Saharan Africa. “Capital inflows have diminished, contributing to falloff in investment growth, particularly in India,” the World Bank said in a March 2009 update. “Fiscal support for slowing economies may face constraints in already quite high budget deficits.”

In her speech to Parliament last week, President Patil said new targets will soon be set for rural electrification by the new government. That will be of some consolation to Ramakanta Sethi, a Dalit boy from the fishing village of Kendrapara in Orissa. Ramakanta, who herded cattle during the day, did exceedingly well in his high school examination, studying at night with only a kerosene lantern for light. When Chief Minister Naveen Patnaik, re-elected last month with a landslide majority on a good-performance ticket, congratulated Ramakanta on his success, embarrassed officials promised to make amends for the darkness in Kendrapara. Electrifying news indeed.

[The writer is former editor in chief of the Hindustan Times and former head of Reuters Asia bureau in Singapore. He as says “has spent Thirty-five years of writing, editing and living in seven countries. Trying to make sense of what is going on around me.” This appeared in the Khaleej Times on June 9, 2009]

BACK

Lack of capital means longer recession developing countries

THE world's poorest countries will see $1 trillion drain from their economies this year according to the first detailed analysis of how the global recession is hitting developing nations.

Figures released by the  World Bank show the financial crisis taking a heavy toll, with the flow of money into the developing world halving this year after heavy losses in 2008.

Despite recent talk of economic green shoots in Britain and the US, the lack of international capital means many poor countries will stay in recession for longer as companies and governments are starved of investment.

The World Bank is calling for greater international policy co-ordination and tighter regulation of the global financial system in response. In its ­authoritative annual Global Development Finance report, the Washington-based institution singles out Africa, central and Eastern Europe and Latin America as regions suffering most from the global recession even while rich nations are starting to talk about recovery.

It reveals that net private capital inflows to poor countries tumbled to $707bn in 2008 from a peak of $1.2tn in 2007. And it forecasts that the inflows will halve again this year to just $363bn.

There is also little chance of overseas aid payments by rich countries taking up the slack left by the drop in private capital flows. The G8 nations, especially France and Italy, were criticised this month for reneging on their promises of increased aid to poor countries.

To prevent a second wave of instability, policies have to focus rapidly on financial sector reform and support for the poorest countries, the Bank officials say.

Developing countries are expected to grow by only 1.2% this year after 6% growth in 2008 and 8% in 2007. But if China and India are excluded, gross domestic product (GDP) in the remaining developing countries is projected to fall 1.6%, causing continued job losses and throwing more people into poverty.

Overall, global GDP is likely to shrink by 2.9% this year and world trade flows by 10%. Europe and central Asia will see a contraction of nearly 5%, recovering to 1.6% in 2010. Sub-Saharan Africa will suffer a drop in growth to just above 1%, sharply down from an average of 5.7% in recent years, hit by falls in remittances from overseas workers and a plunge in foreign direct investment. Thailand has so far suffered the worst, with its GDP plunging by over a fifth in the final quarter of 2008.

BACK